An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.

Author identifies two extremes, "information dictatorship" and "information anarchy", and the flaws of each, as well as a third option "information democracy" to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.

Someone said the link is broken so here it is: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

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[–] psychothumbs 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.

Definitely there's a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn't mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What's important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there's always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.

[–] OasissisaO 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

3067 is a lot of ways to slice half a pie. I'd consider even 16.5% (or whatever the top dog of that 3 with 50% has) to be domination.

[–] psychothumbs 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that's not big enough to impose their will on the whole.

[–] OasissisaO 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It really depends. If you're in a smaller instance and you look at the global view, you're going to see more of Mr. 16.5% than one of the smaller ones.

Though I suspect usage patterns and the way users interact with instances beyond theirs will play a role. But, in an immediate sense, I could see larger instances having a bigger voice (so to speak).

And now I'll waffle and say it's all a crapshoot because people are unpredictable and social media platforms even more so.

[–] psychothumbs 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don't think that's really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.

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